Fostering Sustainable and Resilient Agro-Food Futures in India

Manish Anand says adaptive measures need to be taken in India to achieve sustainable food security in the wake of threats posed by climate change. Further, there is a need to strengthen the capacity and tools to diagnose the challenges and map out integrated long-term strategies bringing coherence across the different dimensions of land-use, food systems, and climate change impacts.

- Manish Anand

Achieving the state of sustainable food and nutrition security remains a major challenge for India, which is home to about 17 per cent of the world’s population given that 14 per cent of its population, continues to be undernourished.1 The importance of stable access to adequate food supplies for sustained human development was highlighted by the World Bank (1986) when it defined food security as “access to adequate food to all people at all times for an active and healthy life” and the need to transform food systems, building resilience, inclusiveness and sustainability, through action-driven at country-level by governments in their local contexts was called for in the recently held United Nations Food Systems Summit in September, 2021.

Although India is self-sufficient in foodgrains production in the macro sense (foodgrain production increased from 50.8 million tonnes in 1950 to an estimated 303.97 million tonnes in 2021–22), the constraints put on the natural resources, mainly land and water, can hinder the achievement of sustainable food security. According to estimates, of the 97.85 million hectare (mha) degraded land 37 mha is classified as agriculture unirrigated affected by various types of degradation including water erosion (80 per cent), wind erosion (17 per cent), alkalinity/sodicity in land (2 per cent), and waterlogging (1 per cent).2 Depletion of natural resources, particularly groundwater, can pose a potential threat to a sustainable food security. Agriculture production, which accounts for more than 80 per cent of groundwater withdrawal in the country, may get affected due to an estimated decline in the availability of groundwater for agriculture use by 20per cent and by 68per cent in regions projected to have low future groundwater availability by 2025.3